Recently, Ride-Hailing Giant Uber open-sourced its Plato Research Dialogue System which a platform for building, training, and deploying conversational AI agents.

Plato Research Dialogue System, according to the company, allows to conduct state of the art research in conversational AI and quickly create prototypes and demonstration systems. Moreover, it also facilitates conversational data collection.

The company said that Plato has been designed keeping in mind both users with a limited background in conversational AI as well as expert researchers in the field. It provides a clean and understandable design, integration with existing deep learning and Bayesian optimization frameworks, and reduces the need for code writing.

The Plato System supports interactions through speech, text, or structured information. Each of these conversational agents can interact with human users, other conversational agents, or data.

Source: Uber

And most importantly, this system can "wrap around existing pre-trained models for every component of a conversational agent, and each component can be trained online (during the interaction) or offline (from data)." wrote the company.